Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire for
halting the eight-day Israeli Gaza operation Wednesday night, Nov. 21,
after President Barack Obama personally pledged to start deploying US
troops in Egyptian Sinai next week, debkafile reports.
The conversation, which finally tipped the scales for a ceasefire,
took place on a secure line Wednesday morning, just hours before it was
announced in Cairo. The US and Israeli leaders spoke at around the time
that a terrorist was blowing up a Tel Aviv bus, injuring 27 people.
Obama’s pledge addressed Israel’s most pressing demand in every
negotiating forum on Gaza: Operation Pillar of Cloud’s main goal was a
total stoppage of the flow of Iranian arms and missiles to the Gaza
Strip. They were smuggled in from Sudan and Libya through southern Egypt
and Sinai. Hostilities would continue, said the prime minister, until
this object was achieved.
Earlier, US officials tried unsuccessfully to persuade Israel to
accept Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s personal guarantee to start
launching effective operations against the smugglers before the end of
the month. The trio running Israel’s Gaza campaign, Netanyahu, Defense
Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, were willing
to take Morsi at his word, except that Israeli security and
intelligence chiefs assured them that Egypt has nothing near the
security and intelligence capabilities necessary for conducting such
operations.
When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Jerusalem from
Bangkok Tuesday, she tried assuring Netanyahu that President Obama had
decided to accelerate the construction of an elaborate US system of
electronic security fences along the Suez Canal and northern Sinai. It
would also cork up the Philadelphi route through which arms are smuggled
into the Gaza Strip.
US security and civilian units will need to be deployed in
Egyptian Sinai to man the fence system and operate it as an active
counter-measure for obstructing the smuggling of Iranian weapons
supplies.
The prime minister said he welcomed the president’s proposal to
expedite the fence project, but it would take months to obtain Egyptian
clearance. Meanwhile, the Palestinians would have plenty of time to
replenish their weapons stocks after Israel’s Gaza campaign. It was
therefore too soon to stop the campaign at this point or hold back a
ground incursion.
Clinton was sympathetic to this argument. Soon after, President
Obama was on the phone to Netanyahu with an assurance that US troops
would be in place in Sinai next week, after he had obtained President
Morsi’s consent for them to go into immediate action against Iranian
smuggling networks.
Netanyahu responded by agreeing to a ceasefire being announced in
Cairo that night by Clinton and the Egyptian foreign minister, and to
holding back the thousands of Israeli reservists on standby on the Gaza
border.
debkafile’s military sources report that the first air transports
carrying US special forces are due to land at Sharm el Sheikh military
airfield in southern Sinai in the next 48 hours and go into action
against the arms smugglers without delay.
This development is strategically significant for three reasons:
1. Once the missile and arms consignments depart Iranian ports or
Libyan arms bazaars, Tehran has no direct control of their transit from
point to point through Egypt until they reach Sinai and their Gaza
destination. All the same, a US special forces operation against the
Sinai segment of the Iranian smuggling route would count as the first
overt American military strike against an Iranian military interest.
Netanyahu, Barak and Lieberman are impressed by the change the
Obama administration has undergone since the president’s reelection.
Until then, he refused to hear of any military action against Iran and
insisted that Tehran could only be confronted on the diplomatic plane.
2. President Morsi, by opening the Sinai door to an American
troop deployment for Israel’s defense, recognizes that the US force also
insures Israel against Cairo revoking or failing to honor the peace
treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979.
3. In the face of this US-Israel-Egyptian understanding, Hamas
cannot credibly claim to have won its latest passage of arms with Israel
or that it obtained guarantees to force Israel to end the Gaza
blockade.
Indeed, Gaza’s Hamas rulers will be forced to watch as US troops
in Sinai, just across its border, break up the smuggling rings filling
their arsenals and most likely laying hands on the reserve stocks they
maintain under the smugglers’ guard in northern Sinai, out of reach of
the Israel army. This means that the blockade on Gaza has been extended
and the focus of combat has switched from Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula.
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